A Heroine of the World —
Tanith Lee

In
Tanith Lee’s 1989 A
Heroine of the World, Aradia
is a child of thirteen when the war begins and her comfortable world
disintegrates. She is not much older by the end of the novel, but in
just a few years, this former rich girl takes on many identities to
survive: a servant, a war-bride, an emperor’s mistress. Among others.

Aradia’s parents, certain of victory, blithely ride off to war,leaving Aradia with a cold, unsympathetic aunt. Aradia never sees her parents again. Her father
dies in a cavalry charge, her mother in an exploding munitions dump.
The conquering Kronians occupy the City where Aradia lives. The aunt
commits suicide in despair.

Aradia
hides among the servant girls. Her hopes of anonymous safety are
dashed when she catches the eye of Flag Colonel Keer Gurz, an
aristocratic officer of the occupying army. The fact that she is
pre-pubescent does not deter him in the least. He offers her
protection from worse men than he in exchange for becoming his
mistress. When the war turns against the Kronians, Gurz retreats and
takes his Ara with him.

He’s
a rotter, but he’s not all bad. In his dying moments, after the
collapse of his army, he marries Ara. She will be a respectable,
well-endowed widow in Kronia, not a discarded camp-follower.

Not
that her life goes all that smoothly after Gurz dies. Kronia is beset
by enemies without and within. The estate Ara has inherited from Gurz
makes her a target for fortune-hunters. She soon attracts the
attention of the Emperor’s bastard son Kahrulan, who is truly, madly,
deeply in love with her bank account. It will be of great help to his
quest for the imperial throne. Ara, a foreign captive raised to the
aristocracy, fears to say no to the man who will almost certainly be
the next emperor. She cannot even bargain for marriage: she becomes
his mistress.

Officer’s
daughter, orphan, child bride, mistress; all these roles are forced
on Ara. The one thing that she wants seems to be beyond her reach:
her aunt’s former lover, a man who is barely aware that Ara exists.
A man seen by all nations as the basest of traitors, career turncoat
Thenser Zavion.…

~oOo~

A
Heroine of the World is
difficult to categorize. It’s set in a secondary world, but it is not
unambiguously fantasy (although DAW marketed it that way). There is
fortune-telling. Ara thinks her god may have intervened in her life.
In both cases, she could be credulous and deluded. Nor is this book
an
alternate history; Ara’s world
resembles ours in some ways, but not in others. I would put this book
in the same MISC pigeonhole as Studio Gainax’sTheWings
of Honneamise anime.

I
was expecting a more conventional book than I actually got, in part
because Lee hands out a generous number of red herrings to the
overconfident reader. Lee could have ended Ara’s adventures with a
return to normalcy, but that was not the story Lee wanted to tell.
Ara is not an indomitable world-conqueror, but a young victim of war
and sexual abuse. While she does get to exercise agency, it is within
very narrow limits.

Many
readers will find Ara frustratingly passive. She is a shell-shocked
thirteen-year-old who is still trying to come to terms with the loss
of her parents and the end of the world as she knew it. She doesn’t
conquer the world, but she copes well enough to keep her head on her shoulders.

I
was also willing to cut her some slack for her idiotic romantic
fixation on the unreliable Thenser. There is no way that is going to
end well, given his taste for dubious adventure and political
intrigue. Lee takes pity on the reader with a carefully timed happy
ending. She ends the story just at the moment when the oddly-assorted
couple has survived one life-threatening crisis and has not yet run
into the next. Unsuspecting readers might be gulled by this authorial
stratagem, but I knew better: unless Ara loses her illusions about
Thenser, she can expect more suffering.

Readers
may find Ara’s “cork on the river of destiny” tendencies
frustrating. However, they may also look forward to the usual Lee
counterweight: glorious prose.

As
far as I can tell, Heroine
of the World
is long out of print in North America. A British edition can
be purchased here.